Sea Days on the Sirenia

 We had eleven sea days on this trip. What did we do? Of course we ate delicious meals. The food was top rate. We ate together almost every night. There was a lot of variety and always the option for a steak, salmon, and a souffle each night. 

Jim, Andy, John, and Mary

We had lectures from several speakers. The most interesting series was from Adam Tanner, who gave us our history lessons about the African countries, the slave trade, and cruise ships. Some people joined this cruise because he was a speaker here. Dorik Stow had a series about geology, especially about the oceans over time and the major events leading to the major extinction events in the earth’s history. I found his talk about the dinosaur extinction event to be especially enlightening they had been dying out for several hundred million years and either a volcano or a asteroid caused the final decline. Christopher Beckett  brought us general history topics, particularly interesting was the talks on the American Revolution from a British point of view, pointing out that our ‘taxation without representation’ from the British viewpoint was American helping with the huge debt that Britain had after the long war with the French including in America. The taxes were significantly less than Brittons were paying at the time.

Geology and the Oceans

We also played a lot of trivia. Jim and Andy are particularly good at trivia. We gained four other players on our team: Tim, Eileen, Bart, Pamela. Each had their expertise and as a team we took one of the first 3 places almost every time we played together, usually first or second. At the end of the trip, we came in first for the daily trivia. There were also lots of games: shuffle board, golf putting, etc.      

Pam, Bart, Eileen, Andy, Mary, John, Jim, and Tim

We also had a Equator Crossing ceremony. We crossed the equator after Sao Tome, but we only rain storm during the planned ceremony. So it was held on April 14th instead. 

We enjoyed almost all the entertainers. We had 5 shows from the production team and band. Almost all the guest entertainers were superb: violinist, singers, comic, and classical guitar. It was also nice to have the show people lead the games, we got to know them well.